Absence: Why absence in my marriage makes me happy

For some reason the other day I was thinking about being married and why Mr. Lyndsy makes me so happy. The word “absence” popped into my head.

I don’t mean it in the “absence makes the heart grow fonder” sense. I mean, I get it. I *hate* when he travels. It’s like my sense of balance is missing when he’s gone. It is a great reminder of why we get married, but that’s not what makes this so good on a day-to-day basis.

Sometimes, it’s the absence of something that you notice the most. So what is it that’s absent from our marriage that makes this work so well?

Judgment, for starters. There are days I don’t get dressed. There are days I barely leave bed. I dye my hair strange colors. I get tattoos. I say I can’t make dinner. I tell him not to put another dish in the sink because I do NOT WANT TO WASH ANOTHER FUCKING DISH RIGHT NOW. Ahem.

No matter what I do, his response is pretty much “Okay.” He doesn’t think anything about it. If I seem sick, he asks what he can do to make me feel better. If it looks like I’m going to throw all the dishes out the window, he says, “I’ll do the rest.” He gives me a hug when he sees blue in my hair. He gets that my tats are expressions of myself. So even when he doesn’t know I’ve been planning on a new one, he rolls with it.

Expectation is also missing from our marriage. The only thing he expects is that I will continue behaving in the way I have since I met him. That’s it. And that’s all I expect of him. So far we’ve both been really consistent in that. We’re both pretty set in who we are, so I don’t see that changing anytime soon either. I think that’s one of the benefits of having met in our 30s instead of 20s. We both had time to figure out who we are and what we want – and we worked to do that (after some gloriously failed relationships).

Bullshit and by this I mean that we seek each other out for help when shit’s gone off the rails, but we keep our own bullshit as our own. I have mood swings from time to time, get upset about stuff that has nothing to do with him and I sort it out for myself. If I need a hug he’s there, but I don’t take shit out on him and he doesn’t take shit out on me. Any outside stress stays outside.

Monopolization of time doesn’t exist here either. We do things together (TV is our jam and we love the LEGO video games), but we leave each other free to do the stuff we like to do. I read for hours and hours on end while he buys every game on the Playstation store. There are entire *weekend* days we don’t see each other because we’re otherwise absorbed. I’ve been with someone who didn’t let me have time to myself. If he wanted my attention, he pouted until he got it.

I suppose that each one of things could be said a different way where ABSENCE wouldn’t be what joins everything together, but what I noticed was the lack of all of those. Perhaps it’s because the presence of awful things is really what helped me form ideas about what would work for me in a relationship and what wouldn’t. However you want to describe it, this is what works for us.